


Seeing

by lotesse



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: F/F, Juvenilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-07-05
Updated: 2004-07-05
Packaged: 2017-10-09 03:52:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/82732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Little girls and their issues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seeing

The Trelawney women had the Second Sight. It had run faintly in their veins until the great Cassandra, the first to completely manifest the gift. Headmaster Nigellus of Hogwarts, nasty old Slytherin that he was, had called it a fluke, a surprise, but the Trelawney women had always known their gift.

 

Little Sibyll never thought of not having it. The Sight was like air, ubiquitous and eternal.

 

But Hogwarts was so very different from her dim, silent, smoky home, heavy with the psychic vibrations of generations. The school was loud and bright and shining, and everyone laughed at her Romany shawls and the talismans hanging heavy around her little neck. The noisy Scottish girl with the long, loose brown hair laughed loudest of all. "None of that fortune-telling rubbish is real," she had declared to all and sundry on the train, the other children clustering around her air of authority. "Only the sort of thing that would interest a Ravenclaw. You know, theories and all that. It's a waste of time." And Sibyll thought that she had never heard anyone sound so sure of anything, nothing like the Trelawney women with their whispers and riddles.

 

That summer she locked herself away in her attic room with heavy oracles and sheaves of parchment prophecies past, looking for certainty. She was a Seer, and all the knowledge of the world was there for her taking. She started wearing large, round glasses. They were very heavy, because her mother had insisted on the lenses being ground from the purest crystal. "They will revive your life-force, Sibyll," she'd said mistily. "They can be of assistance to you."

 

The Scottish girl's name was Minerva. Sibyll knew, because Minerva was on the Gryffindor Quidditch team as a Chaser. Sibyll never talked to her, but she always knew where she was. She knew which boys Minerva watched and that she read the Daily Prophet each morning for the sole purpose of scoffing at it and that she ate unsweetened oatmeal for breakfast without fail or variance. Sibyll watched her silently, gazing into crystal balls for Minerva's future and interpreting the remains of the Gryffindor's supper from across the Hall.

 

That spring she turned thirteen, the magic age, and that summer she worked harder than ever, studying the stars and their great secrets in her nightdress, carefully silent so as not to wake her mother.

 

In Sibyll 's third year she began taking Divination. She had Forseen that she would do very well. She was, after all, a Trelawney woman. She correctly intuited that she would have double Divination with the Gryffindors, but her heart still began to beat faster when Minerva sat down on a chintz pouf beside Rolonda Hooch. She hadn't thought to see the skeptical girl in this class. This was her chance; she divined great and wonderful things for her future. Minerva would finally see her, the priestess of the oracle of time, and know her power. And then Minerva would love her.

 

Her hands trembled as she poured tea into her blue china cup. Minerva, she saw, had taken a pink one, and she wished that she could change. Grimacing at its unsweetened bitterness, she drank the tea in one gulp and spun the cup three times widdershins, with-way, as her mother had taught her. She didn't bother listening to the middle-aged and dowdy man standing at the front of the class. She had been taught by greater Seers than he. She breathed deeply, trying for the perfect trance state that her mother had taught her, forcing her to sit still for hours looking into the fire, firmly ordering her to empty her mind of all thoughts and open herself. She couldn't quite get it, because she kept seeing the swing of Minerva's long brown hair out of the corner of her eye, but she was close enough for classwork. She looked down into the teacup and gave a little scream. There was a crooked cross in the bottom, the sodden tealeaves glimmering with the moisture that they had kept from her mouth. The cup tumbled from her shaking hands, spilling hot tea dregs all over her robes and splattering the floor with bits of broken china. A cross. Ill fortune and suffering. She was trembling and crying, and the well-meaning but hopelessly mundane professor was there beside her asking what was wrong and all the hope and tension and waiting that was ruined now drained out of her. She knew that she looked like a silly little girl, and that Minerva was watching with a smirk, but she couldn't bring herself to care. Everything was pointless now, and all her hard work gave her nothing but embarrassment. She had dropped her cup like a little girl, showing none of the appropriate dignity for a Seeress.

 

Shamefully, red-faced, Sibyll turned to look at Minerva full in the face. The Gryffindor was laughing scornfully with Hooch, imitating Sibyll's earnest cry of dismay. "Did you see? She actually believes in this stuff, you know. Bats in the belfry. But they say that all her family's mad."

 

Sibyll would not further disgrace her family and herself by crying any more in class, but her eyes gleamed brighter than nature behind her huge, heavy glasses. She knew with a Seer's certainty that Minerva would never understand her, would never want to. And while she was just a stupid, mundane, loudmouthed Gryffindor, Sibyll wished with all her heart that she did not know so surely. But prophecy could not be changed by idle wishing, and she would not flinch. She would hold true to her art, in the face of Minerva McGonagall and all other skeptics and unbelievers, in the face of her own heart.

 

Many years later, Minerva wore her long, loose hair pinned into fiercely tight knots at the nape of her neck, the strict Transfigurations teacher, and Sibyll was thinner and more misty than ever, her glasses hanging pendulous with their increased weight, still ground of the finest crystal. And when one night she was screaming and crying and more than half drunk on cooking sherry, when all of her carefully mystical and mysterious life seemed to be crumbling, she consoled herself with the thought that at least she had remained loyal to her family and her craft, never allowing the barbs of the narrow-minded to pierce her, not even Minerva's. And when Minerva took her arm that night and helped her home and held her close, she did not dare to hope. The cross in the teacup all those years ago had told true, and she had suffered. She had been alone on the lofty pedestal of the prophetess for too long to think that one with a clouded Inner Eye would show her pity or love. But when Minerva kissed her on the brow, she felt calmed despite herself. And when Minerva kissed her on the lips she closed her eyes and let the dream happen, not ever wanted to awake to the harsh, bright, disbelieving light of day. She was a Trelawney woman, and she had the second sight, but for a moment she closed her eyes and was blind.


End file.
